This special section of Social Science History launches a series of five articles illustrative of what we believe is an eclectic center in the development of historical studies of institutions and policies, often termed the “new institutionalism.” The new institutionalism emerged in the early 1980s in reaction to “a long season in which social forces and processes were the predominant topics of study” (Orren and Skowronek 1986). While the precise role of institutions varies according to the practitioner, hallmarks of the new institutionalism include a portrayal of institutions as semiautonomous actors; a contextualization of institutions within sociohistorical processes (and vice versa); a recognition of inefficiency, contingency, and accident in history; and a recognition of the relative autonomy of ideas and symbolic action in historical development (March and Olsen 1984, 1989; Krasner 1984; Smith 1988; Katznelson 1992). As is expected of new paradigms, the entry of the new institutionalism into the intellectual community has been marked by an array of polemics against its predecessors, “old” schools defined by “old institutionalism,” behaviorism, and structural functionalism. It has also generated a wave of spirited counterattacks (Mitchell 1991; Bendix et al. 1992; Ethington and McDonagh forthcoming).

Facing severe social and economic challenges following World War II, both Chicago and Milwaukee formed local economic development partnerships. However, Chicago’s development approach emphasized downtown, while Milwaukee’s approach focused largely on manufacturing. This article uses literature on path dependence and urban regimes to show how development strategies initiated in both cities during the late 1940s became entrenched over time, although more so in Chicago than in Milwaukee. I argue that postwar development policy in each city can be understood only through a genuinely historical approach that links outcomes at the close of this narrative in 1980 with key causal factors dating back to the 1940s.

Despite decades of research, demographic historians are still uncertain about mortality trends and determinants in early New England. Although researchers agree that New England mortality was low relative to other regions of early America in the seventeenth century, they disagree about the direction of mortality trends over the course of the eighteenth century. Community-based reconstitution studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s at first seemed to provide strong evidence of a decline in adult life expectancy (Greven 1970; Norton 1971; Vinovskis 1972; D. S. Smith 1973). More recent studies, however, contradict the assessment of deteriorating health conditions in eighteenth-century New England. Family-based genealogical studies document a substantial long-term increase in adult male life expectancy over the course of the century, although the increase was followed by a slight decline in the early part of the nineteenth century (Fogel 1986; Kasakoff and Adams 1995).

In his presidential address to the American Statistical Association in 1931, William Fielding Ogburn, an American sociologist important particularly in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, took as his theme the difference between statistics and art. His argument, articulated here and in a wide range of writings throughout his career, was that “statistics has been developed to give an exact picture of reality, while the picture that the artist draws is a distortion of reality” (Ogburn 1932: 1). He then went on to express his belief that emotion leads to distortion in our observations. “It is this distorting influence of emotion and wishes,” he said, “that is more responsible for bad thinking than any lack of logic” (ibid.: 4). But statistics, he believed, could ameliorate the distorting effects of emotion on our empirical observations. There was a problem, however, because “the artist in us wants understanding rather than statistics. But understanding is hardly knowledge. . . . The tests of knowledge are reliability and accuracy, not understanding” (ibid.: 5).

This article began with a puzzle. In our book Domestic Revolutions, Steven Mintz and I took as one of our major themes the rich ethnic variety among American families. Indeed, we argued that there is no such thing as the American family. Yet as we moved forward in time, the theme of ethnic variation became submerged in discussions of class and racial variation. To some extent, our discussion mirrored the historical and sociological literature. But the slipperiness of ethnic variation in contemporary families may also reflect something about the nature of contemporary ethnicity.

The pre-world war I period decisively structured modern class relations in Europe and the United States. Farmers, the largest population group, greatly influenced the development of capitalism and states. Scholars have demonstrated farmers’ significance in particular areas (e.g., Blackbourn in Germany and Esping-Andersen in Scandinavia), but there has been little comparative analysis. Farmer politics, and thus modern class relations in general, have been inadequately theorized. Most existing work on agrarian classes has also been economistic, neglecting politics. We fill the gaps by analyzing agrarian politics in the United States, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.

Anyone who has tried to teach undergraduates about the election of 1896 should instinctively appreciate Walter Dean Burnham’s enormous contribution in making sense of that election and its aftermath. Waged between two rather uninteresting men over issues that defy easy understanding, the presidential contest of 1896 hardly stacks up with those of 1860 and 1932 as “critical” in the casual sense of the term. Perhaps if William Jennings Bryan had defeated William McKinley, or, better still, if the glamorous Theodore Roosevelt had been the victorious Republican candidate, or, best of all, if Roosevelt had won and immediately started a major war, the election of 1896 would more readily appear to have been the transforming event that modern scholars contend it was. But, alas, McKinley won, waited over a year before reluctantly waging even a minor war, and proved unwilling to make any significant departures in domestic policy. Compared to the election of Abraham Lincoln or that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the contest of 1896 appears trivial. Who can blame undergraduates for yawning over the “Battle of the Standards”?

The connection between political radicalization and political violence is often thought to follow “organic stages.” That is, radicalization is considered to be a progression leading to violence, after which time radicalization and violence evolve together dialectically. This ideal-typical process does correspond to historical evidence, and this article presents such evidence from the political contention in Palestine during the Mandate period. However, other historical evidence points to deviations from this ideal type. Evidence from political contention in pre-1921 Ireland and in pre-1960 Cyprus suggests two forms of such deviations. Irish history suggests that violence may be effectively introduced by political forces that at an earlier stage had not been part of the process of political contention at large; Cypriot history suggests that violence may be introduced through forces that were autonomous from the ongoing process of political contention even though organizationally part of it. The historical comparison at hand, furthermore, points to the increased role of historical contingency in the instances where the relation between political radicalization and political violence deviates from the ideal-typical form.

There is a growing body of literature exploring the relationship between regulated professions and the state. Research has shown that the state is the key source of power for professions, and it has suggested that professions may support and assist state agencies and actors in many ways. Although studies have documented changing state-profession relations across region and era and recent research points to significant change in the regulation of some professions in the past decade or two, there remains much that we do not know about the changing nature of professional regulation over time. In this article I examine professional regulation in four Canadian provinces between 1867 and 1961. The findings reveal distinct eras of professional regulation and definite differences in who is regulated and how over time. There are many more regulated professions toward the end of the period, they are more closely regulated by the state, and their relationships to each other are more closely delineated. The implications for our understanding of state-profession relations over time are discussed.

This article tests Federalist and Anti-Federalist explanations for state contributions to the confederation government using data on troop requisitions from 1775 to 1783. The Federalists claimed that state politicians acted unilaterally and contributed when the Continental army protected their state's interests. The Anti-Federalists claimed that state politicians understood their duty to the Union and contributed to advance its needs. The results suggest that, with one important caveat, states contributed more consistent with the Federalist argument. This helps explain why the Articles of Confederation needed reform.

In a Recent Critical review of sociological perspectives on historical problems, Skocpol observed, “Until the 1970s, ‘historical sociology’ was not a phrase one often, if ever, heard in conversations among sociologists in the United States” (Skocpol, 1984: 356). Of course there was a good deal of prior historical work by sociologists, some of which Skocpol herself goes on to cite. Yet, by her phrasing, she has inadvertently raised a question about the place of history in the discipline of sociology. Like almost all sociologists who use historical materials or perspectives, Skocpol sees reason to complain about the failure of sociology to give a larger place to history. But for me, a prior issue, in the spirit of a historically minded sociology, involves discovering what happened to the name “historical sociology.” The naming of an activity, in this case historical sociology, and its performance—historical research and interpretations by sociologists—are quite distinct. The first task is to clarify their relationship.

Guest registers for six commercial hotels are analyzed to reveal everyday, nonmigratory travel patterns associated with small towns and villages in the upper Susquehanna valleys of New York and Pennsylvania at the turn of the twentieth century. The residences of guests are mapped using geographic information system (GIS) software and reveal two broad patterns of connectivity, a translocal cluster of visitors from places within the immediate vicinity and a set of visitors from more distant places up the urban system. Census and directory data identify many repeat visitors, such as hucksters and peddlers extending the reach of rural stores and merchants traveling circuits as agents of metropolitan manufacturing centers. In addition to commercial travelers, the presence of traveling entertainments, such as vaudeville acts and circuses, in hotel guest registers reveals shifts in American popular culture and entertainments on small-town Main Streets. These registers offer a fixed window onto a mobile world, and the signatures hint at the types of connections between these settlements and the outside world.

Every government policy has positive and negative externalities: offshoots and spin-offs that either are unplanned or exceed calculated expectations. New Deal agricultural policy was no exception. One controversial aspect of it is the alleged role of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) in southern tenant and sharecropper displacement. Whether or not the officials of the AAA underestimated or even cared about this phenomenon, many contemporaries and most historians have criticized the Roosevelt administration for it.

In a recent article in Social Science History, Flanigan and Zingale reviewed the old problem of inferring individual relationships from aggregate data, cast doubt on Goodman’s ecological regression technique as a method of estimating such relationships, and contended that the specification analysis approach to the issue was misleading. Instead, they argued that an ad hoc procedure suggested by Shively in a 1974 article was superior to Goodman’s point estimates because it avoids dubious assumptions and forces investigators to make their premises clear. Comparing results from analyses of state-level data on major party voting in the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections with figures from the Michigan surveys, they concluded, to their satisfaction at least, that the assumptions required for ecological regression were badly violated and that it was preferable in this and other cases to use the system that Shively, without making any grandiose claims for it, had originated (Flanigan and Zingale, 1985; Goodman, 1959; Hanushek et al., 1974; Shively, 1974; Langbein and Lichtman, 1978).

Study of the popular response to the political parties and candidates of nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States history has made significant progress since the 1950s. Samuel Lubell in The Future of American Politics was certainly one of the first to show historians that much understanding about the voting behavior of past generations could be gleaned from an imaginative examination of county and precinct election data. Lee Benson, in his now classic essay on “Research Methods in American Political Historiography,” persuasively demonstrated to many that systematic analysis of quantitative data could improve the accuracy and quality of generalizations about past voting practices. Benson’s subsequent study of early nineteenth-century New York politics, The Concept ofJacksonian Democracy, which quickly became a model of excellence in research design and methods, concluded, among other things, that “socioeconomic cleavages” were less important in explaining how New Yorkers voted after about 1820 than were “ethnic and religious” factors. At least in part inspired by Benson’s findings in New York, other historians pursued the study of the relationship between voting behavior and ethnocultural and religious factors by examining, for example, political behavior in Michigan during the Jacksonian era, the Midwest and Northeast during the 1890s, and Chicago in the early twentieth century. While the emphasis upon the importance of ethnocultural and religious factors in voting has engendered some criticism and dissent, it seems fair to conclude that this approach to the study of the voting process has produced significant work that has substantially influenced interpretations of American political history.

The contributions included in this issue celebrate the 22d-year anniversary of the fall 1982 issue of Social Science History (vol. 6, no. 4) devoted to “Trends in Nutrition, Labor Welfare, and Labor Productivity.” The guest editors then were Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, and all but one of the eight contributions were dedicated to anthropometric history (Fogel and Engerman 1982; Fogel et al. 1982; Floud and Wachter 1982; Friedman 1982;Margo and Steckel 1982; Sokoloff and Villaflor 1982; Tanner 1982). The issue had a considerable impact on the fledgling field of anthropometric history, even if a few publications preceded it in other journals (Fogel et al. 1978; Steckel 1979; Trussell and Steckel 1978).

The editor of Social Science History at the time, James Q. Graham, hoped to expand the exploration of human heights and their economic and social correlates. He was one of the few journal editors convinced early on that such an agenda fit well into an interdisciplinary historical perspective.

The early economic development of regions of recent European settlement such as Canada, the United States, Australia, and Argentina was similar in that each region began by exporting products with a high natural resource content. Yet in each case the pace and character of growth and development has differed depending on the timing of the initial settlement, the nature of institutions, and the type of resource export and its market demand. The economic development of resource abundant, sparsely populated regions has been explained by what has become known as the staples approach or models of export-led development.

Past research suggests that although political violence in mature democracies is rare, it does occasionally occur along ethnic, religious, and/or linguistic lines. Jamaica is an exceptional case in that it is a relatively mature democracy that experiences political violence between demographically similar groups. This article examines the origins of political violence in Jamaica—that is, the conditions that led to its development, intensification, and institutionalization during the late colonial period. Through original archival research, this article supports past findings identifying personality politics, the politicization of race/class divisions, and clientelism as contributing factors to the development of political violence. The research also, however, makes a major new contribution by providing evidence that colonial nonintervention during the early stages of political violence was a crucial factor leading to its escalation and then institutionalization. This finding gives the British colonial state a different and more central role than the extant literature suggests and has broader implications for all democracies.

Historians and social scientists have relied on contemporaneous textual accounts to document African American mobility in the immediate aftermath of emancipation after the Civil War, but they have interpreted them in widely varying ways. Some emphasize large-scale migration across the South, while others suggest that most movements were local and limited. This research tracks the early or “first wave” of African American migrants between 1865 and 1867 within and out of the South in an attempt to map the motion taking place after the war and to document the scale, direction, and intensity of African American mobility in the period between 1865 and 1867. The Freedmen's Bureau records indicate certain kinds of movements within the South, while our census methodology shows that there was more movement out of the South than accounted for in the Freedmen's Bureau labor records or previously accounted for in the historiography. Further, we observe two types of movement: short-term migration based on one-year contracts, perhaps returning to the point of origin, and another movement not always mediated through the Freedmen's Bureau that was more long term, but also subject to the freedperson's return to the point of origin. We seek to chart the process of emancipation over time and across space, detecting spatial patterns on an otherwise highly variable individual experience. No study has used the Freedmen's Bureau labor contracts to trace African American labor movements, and no study has deployed the 1880 individual census data to examine African American migration based on birthplace cohorts.